Bob Isherwood Surprises Audience at Creative LIAisons Event

On Tuesday,
advertising legend and Innocean chairman Bob Isherwood dropped into the London
International Awards’ Creative LIAisons event in Las Vegas to give an
unscheduled masterclass in advertising.

Bob was originally due
for a flying visit to the LIA judging to meet up with Innocean colleagues but
decided to drop in to the Creative LIAisons event, in which 85 young creatives
are flown to Las Vegas to learn from the most senior creative minds in the
advertising business.

Armed with a
digeridoo, the former Worldwide Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi
shared words of wisdom and fielded questions from the assembled creatives.

“I think creative
advertising is more work than most people probably imagine because it’s hard to
do creative advertising. Most advertising I see is dumb, boring and it’s done
by people who don’t believe in it. A very good friend of mine, Edward de Bono,
is the man who coined the term ‘lateral thinking’. I’ve worked with him quite a
bit and Edward once said to me that creative people in advertising are some of
the least creative people he meets. That’s pretty brutal but there is some
truth to it.”

He shared his criteria
for evaluating work, both as a judge and as a creative director. Successful
creative fulfils Bob’s ‘ORE’ system – work that is original, relevant and makes
an emotional connection. Unfortunately, he noted, much work fails to clear the
first hurdle of originality.

Let passion drive you

However, while Bob was
critical of the glut of mediocre advertising, he had plenty of insights to help
the ambitious young audience achieve creative excellence.

The first was about
the importance of passion and combining that with initiative. “If you don’t
have passion you won’t get very far. So I don’t know your passion level, I
don’t know whether you are working in the agency you want to be working in
right now or for the people you want to be working for… I left Australia, my
country, and I didn’t go back for 17 years because the best people in the world
weren’t there at the time and I wanted to work for the best people in the
world. I wanted to be the best. And that’s the fast track way to do it. If you
have passion and you want to be the best don’t leave it for now, if you’re not
in the right place don’t stay there. Identify the people you want to work for
and know the work they do, identify the individual and try to work for that
person. It will carry you a long, long way because their talent will rub off on
you.”

Prepare for ‘spectacular failure’

Punk pioneer Malcolm
McLaren, who was a friend of Bob, inspired the next piece of advice – that
greatness is only possible when you risk failure. Malcolm discovered this when
an art school tutor told his class that none of them could possibly become
‘spectacular successes’ as all the great works of art had already been
produced… and at that moment Malcolm decided that he would instead aim to be a
‘spectacular failure’.

That philosophy led to
deliberately obtuse-yet-original business decisions (like opening his shop for
just a few hours a day, placing a mud pit just by the entrance and managing the
Sex Pistols). Those in turn led to the formation of punk, and, ultimately, Malcolm’s
success.

“So what’s the lesson
in this?” asked Bob. “The word ‘spectacular’ is I think the lesson. Most of us
don’t work in that category, most of us don’t want to go off like a rocket for
fear of coming down like a firework. We play in the middle, we don’t want to be
truly spectacular because we’re not prepared to be spectacular failures. But if
you want to be great and you want to be a true artist and do truly great
advertising, truly original advertising, you have to run that risk.”

Get out of the office

When it comes to
generating ideas, Bob said that the best thing creatives could do was to get
out of the office and into the streets and visit the client’s factories and
workplace. Insights gleaned from real life are always richer and more interesting
than anything we can make up.

To illustrate his
point, Bob recalled an anecdote from his time at CDP. When working on Parker
Pens ads, he would always make a trip to the factory and every time he would
return with new inspiration. For example, on one visit he spotted a pile of
empty walnut shells on the floor. When he asked his guide what they were for,
he replied that they were used to polish gold. Why? They had never found
anything that worked better.

“Well… if you can’t
write an ad about that then you shouldn’t be in the business… but you could
never make it up,” said Bob.

Once when at Saatchi
& Saatchi, Bob was working with two young creatives who were struggling to
come up with ideas for their client, Sydney’s Metropolitan Police. Bob sent
them off to spend the weekend riding along in the back of a squad car through
Sydney’s toughest neighbourhoods – and they came back on Monday with 40 ad
ideas.

The talk rounded off
with a Q&A session with the young creatives, who took full advantage of the
opportunity to pick the brains of an industry legend.

Don't tell my mother I'm in advertising, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.

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